...fatalistic mood ahead...
My brother wrote me a text message today asking "so what do we do now? Stock up on guns and ammo?" DH and I actually were talking about what we would need to do if Obama was elected, and that was one thing we had talked about.

Energy prices are going to skyrocket. That we know for sure. Obama said in the past that he didn't mind the $4 gas, it was just a shame that it was so quick in getting there because we didn't have time to "adjust" to it. He also said he is going to bankrupt the coal industry, which means electricity is going to be much higher. I love how when gas prices are high, everyone says "just walk or ride a bike." Really? Sure, I can ride a bike 160 miles to work. I can pull the planter or drill with an ox team. I can cut the wheat with a scythe. Great idea. Now, how about be a little practical and remember not everyone lives in the middle of a city.

I told my brother that stocking up might be a good idea, and another one is pay off your debts and start saving money in case you get laid off.

Layoffs are coming. They are hitting around here hard. My company is laying off 5% now and probably 5% in 90 days. I didn't know this, but there is some kind of law that if you lay off more than 5% of your workforce, you have to give the employees a 60 day notice and pay the employees the whole time. If you wait 90 days, you can do 5% now, 5% later and it can be immediate (like, you don't know it's coming until you try to log into your computer and your login is disabled, so you call the helpdesk and they say "you need to talk to your manager"). Another airplane company is laying off workers (same...5% now, 5% later), and another has shortened their day to 3 day shifts. The lady I rent a room from said that if she gets laid off she's selling the house and moving in with her mom (both are single, and my room-lord takes care of her quite a bit) but her mom has a 3 bedroom house so I could rent from her as long as I don't get laid off too

Here comes card check, too. No more secret ballot for seeing if you want to be in a union. Instead, intimidation will be the rule.

After that, every single abortion-restricting law in the country will be struck down. Including allowing underage girls to get them without parental notification, and no consequences for whoever got her pregnant, even though that is statutory rape. Including partial-birth abortion (Barbara Boxer actually said in a debate on the Congressional floor that the line of when babies should have the right to live should be when the parents are putting the baby in the car seat for the ride home. Don't believe me? Look it up.)

The Supreme Court could take a hard, hard turn to the left, and instead of actually looking at the Constitution, they could just fly by the seat of their pants and decide these cases based on fuzzy feelings and what "feels right" not if the law they are considering constitutional.

I am going to send my senator the book "War and Peace" and some throat lozenges so he can get his filibuster on. At least we still have that. I think. Or did Al Franken get elected? Makes sense if he did. Congress is a bad joke right now anyway.

Oh, and I just wanted to ask...has the price of bread gone down 25% since this summer? Because the price of wheat has. Remember that when you blame the price of the commodity for the food going up. There is hardly any correlation, just a good excuse to blame those darned farmers. They have such an easy job, don't you think they get paid too much?

Someone told me today "you had to have Jimmy Carter before you could have Ronald Reagan." Hopefully either the Republican party pulls their head out of their ass and gets back to being fiscally conservative instead of don't-tax,-but-spend-anyway idiots or a viable third party knocks them out of the way.

Funny how we had the worst post-election day plunge in the markets ever. Perhaps the market can see what is coming?
/fatalistic mood

Now, as for personal stuff...

I haven't really posted since we cut the beans. We got 35 bushels / acre...that was pretty much what we were shooting for. DH wanted more, I was just trying to be practical. At least we got them cut and they aren't on the ground like the wheat was after that hail storm! When we took those fields over this spring they were cockle burr patches, so this was pretty good for our first crop off of it.

Sold the wheat the other day. We got $4.90 a bushel for it. It was up to $14 or so this spring. We sold the first of it for $8.04 in July, and hoped that after harvest was over and we got to fall it would go back up to those levels. Great plan, huh?

We should be weaning the calves here any day now. I hope this weekend, but we've been saying that for about a month now. We'll feed them out for 2-2.5 months and sell them in January. Wow. I just thought about that. We should have done it last month so we could sell them this year while these tax rules are still in place. We don't know what will happen next year.

A friend of mine at work takes old cast off computers and refurbishes them, installs Windows XP and sells them for really cheap ($75 for the computer and monitor). The computer shells may have stickers or scratches on them, but they are better computers than we have at work on our desks, and almost as good as the one I have at home right now. Not a good "gamer" computer but it would do anything else you want it to do. He sells the computer itself for $65 and $10 for the monitor (a CRT, not a flat screen) We got one for my MIL, my mom bought one, the grocery store downtown bought one, and my sister got one. They paid me for them, except the one for MIL is a present. Mom, I don't think you read this, but if you do, don't highlight the next two sentences:
We got mom a laptop. All of us went in on it, and it was only $200.

We are going to try to get my dad a seat for his tractor. The one he has doesn't have any padding and it doesn't have any spring left in it. Think about how it is when your shocks on your car are shot...that is the same, but much worse (the fields are bumpier than roads).

As for money. Good news...we haven't had to use the credit card or the line of credit since August. We had a large coop bill due on October 31 and got that paid off (fuel for 600 gal. diesel tank, plus 2 115 gal oil and hydrolic oil tanks, plus normal pickup fuel, etc. = $6000), we have the tractor/baler payment due November 15 ($4767) and the farm insurance payment due November 24 ($1050). I got the other half of the CRP payments October 22, so that helped. Right now, we are about $2000 short for all of this, but, we have soybeans and milo to sell, and we have people who owe us for swathing/baling for them. We just have to get them to pay us by then. And we have some farm payments still coming our way. The first land payment of $9900 is due December 1, and that money is saved from when we sold the house in September. Too bad we don't have a few more houses to sell!!!

Indeterminant news...still waiting on the credit card transfer offer. Someone had applied for a credit card in my name and I had to put a block on my credit, so it is taking a lot longer to get this through than I thought. They needed a copy of my social security card and my address before they could process it, and I sent that in last week. Hopefully when I get back home, the approval letter will be there. Because if it isn't we are going to really be hurting (I have a lot on 0% cards and hopefully I can roll that over for another year).

Bad news...the house that is on the land we bought would take about $20,000 just to make it livable before we could even move in. We would have to do new windows and doors, a new roof and fix the foundation. before we could move in. After that, fixing it up to a house we would like to live in would be lots, lots, lots more. We think it will be better to just put in a basement somewhere else on the property and get a modular home, maybe a used one, maybe a foreclosed one, and move it there. That will be long term, though.