…is Soviet Russia.

As promised, here is a photo of me wearing that super cool watch that Chad covets.

And my Kiev-15.

I’ve had this discussion with a few people, including my good friend Danny, and keep coming back to the point that spending more money has not yet helped in times of economic crisis. Bush shouldn’t have thrown money at the problem with his “economic stimulus plan”, no bailout has helped, and now our leaders are trying to pass a plan to spend, at the moment, $800 billion. That will surely rise to over $1 trillion after everyone get their say, their earmarks, their pork.

I still don’t understand why the President’s (any President) economic advisers are given more weight that Nobel Prize winners, active researchers, and other leading economists who have no party affiliation and no reason to spread doom and gloom.

More money hasn’t yet fixed the problem. Not now, not during the Great Depression, not during the Panic of 1893. We need smart, efficient spending, tax cuts, regulation reform/scaling back, and we need businesses who made poor decisions to be allowed to fail.

CATO took out this ad yesterday and I thought it was pretty interesting. Click the link to see the 200 signatures of economists who signed the petition.

Fiscal Reality Central.

“There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”

— PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, JANUARY 9 , 2009

With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

We had a few inches of cold, white, crystalline stuff fall yesterday in Greenville. Yes, I’m referring to snow. It’s nice. Cors loves it and jumps around like a bunny. It’s pretty funny. I realised that Greenville is terrible about clearing the roads in town–not to mention Facilities staff clearing outside our office. So I ended up pulling on my snowboard boots to walk to work today. That was a workout for sure.

I always feel like it’s not worth it to buy regular snowboots when we only get one good snowfall a year here. If we end up moving to Syracuse then I’m sure I’ll break down and buy some real boots.

I’m anxiously waiting for 05 Feb. so that I can update my TaxCut software and finish my taxes for the year. Looks like we’ll have a good refund, but maybe better if some of these tax cuts go through. We’ll see what happens.

I found out that my grad school app will *most likely* be reviewed around 01 Feb., which is next week! So I’m hoping I will hear back soon about whether or not I’m in. My cousin Josh teaches Political-Science at SUNY in Buffalo, which is awesome. It’ll be cool to have family nearby if we do get to move out to Syracuse. He’s already invited us over for Thanksgiving if we are there.

Jess and I have this feeling of unrest, sort of, I think. We’re ready to move on.

In other news, I finished Jessica’s new blog template last week and I am pretty happy with it. Her Etsy store is doing pretty well and she’s getting some new items up. It’s pretty cool. You should check both of them out.

Jess and I are back in cold, windy Illinois. Our flights yesterday weren’t terrible, but I’m still angry that US Airways charges $2 for water. That’s bad when you have connecting flights less than a hour apart and can’t bring more than 3oz of a liquid through bloody TSA security. Also, St Louis TSA is making you take more than just your laptop out of your bad. All large electronics. Guess who isn’t. CRW, LAX, GEG, DTW. TSA then outright lied to me saying have always done the large electronics (by the way, my D80 counted as large), when I know for a fact that just six months ago they did not.

We had fun in Spokane with the family but 16 hours of flights where you get hassled by everyone is exhausting. That and getting only 7 hours of sleep over the weekend.

Our plane landed at GEG at 10:30 PST. Feeling like 12:30 am to us, and having not eaten or had anything to drink since lunchtime, we were dead tired. Dad and Uncle Dennis picked us up and took us to the house. There were 13 people sleeping at Aunt Jean and Uncle Dennis’s house.

We stayed up for a couple of hours talking until we finally went to sleep. Next morning we went to brunch at this pretty great restaurant-wine bar, Vin Rouge. I had crepes filled with chicken, fontina cheese, wilted spinach… it was delicious. And we ended up just laughing and having a great time.

The rest of the day was spent hanging out until the big birthday party that night. We ate steak and chicken, gave Aunt Jean joke presents, and had a great time. We stayed up late playing Beyond Balderdash with my cousins and sisters, and finally went to bed at 2 am, ready for an early morning flight.

It was too quick a visit and too much traveling, but so much fun. Here are a few photos from the trip, but you can see more in my photostream.

Jess and I flew into Spokane last night. 8ish hours of flying. My aunt’s 60th birthday is today and we’ve joined my parents, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandpa here to celebrate. It’s been great so far, I just wish we had a little more time. I had forgotten how gorgeous Washington state is.

Lots of snow, lots of laughter, tons of fun.

So I posted about my wife’s new Etsy store a couple days ago. She’s already sold something and has been getting a lot of interest, which is so cool! She’s working hard on getting a bunch more stuff up on her store. Sales from that is how we buy presents for our friends and family during the year

Anyway. To go along with her new store, I felt she needed a new look for her blog, and a new URI. So I registered waysideviolet.com and got to work on a new design. Here’s a screenshot of where I’m at so far:

Hop over to the Skitch page and let me know what you think. I’ll probably put it live on her blog in a couple of days.

I’m still working on Wix’s blog, but probably won’t have a good working version until next week. Jess and I have a packed weekend — we’re flying out to Spokane Friday evening to meet up with my family for my aunt’s 60th birthday. It’ll be fun when we’re there, but I’m not looking forward to the airports. Then we’ll have one weekend at home before we drive out to WV for my father-in-law’s 50th. So much going on travel-wise. Thus is life, I suppose.

Remember:

My wife has opened an Etsy.com store with some super cool knit items for sale. Right now she’s got some awesome cable knit coffee sleeves/cozies for sale. She made me one for Christmas and it’s awesome. Way cooler than those ones you get at Starbucks, reusable, and therefore less wasteful. Head over to her store to check them out. And at least give her a good rating!

Wow. Sorry for the lack of posts. A ton is going on at work. And at night, well Jess and I have been burning through the How I Met Your Mother DVDs. Hilarious show. I highly recommend it.

So what else has been going on? Well, we’re rolling on our dotCMS project at work. We’re in the design stages, which is fantastic, and I’m acting as project manager. Kevin started work on Monday and is getting into the swing of stuff. We’re going to have a lot of fun with this as it moves.

I’ve been working on a site design for my friend Chris. I’m hoping to start slicing and markup by this weekend at the latest. I would like to have his blog rolled out by the middle of February, and once the designs are done, the actual coding shouldn’t take too horribly long. I’m pretty proud of it too, it’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Here’s a sample.

Implementing some new stuff over at AgapeFest.com. New videoBlog up, a deal with Sonicbids, some other stuff. It’s going good.

I’m reading this incredible book called The Meaning of Night. It’s incredible and complicated, so it’d take a lot to explain it. Hit up Amazon and read the summary. It’s so good.

Jess is finally reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves and thinks it is great, just as I predicted she would.

It is super cold here this morning. -2ºF. And my office is drafty.