Outside My Front Door

There is beauty all around us and I must admit that many of my photographs are taken on our small city lot. My beloved is an avid gardener and it shows. The Angel Trumpet below is in its second bloom, a little paler in yellow, and little less fragrant, but a welcoming sight right outside our front door. The Virginia Creeper is disguising our somewhat ugly fire place brick, but today it is bare and the soil beneath it carpeted in blood red.

The plaque is a reminder not only appropriate for gardening, but for life in general. I just caught up on the financial news after being out all day and I see that the markets have spiked yet again. This time in the right direction, however, tomorrow may bring another story. This month alone the world equity market lost $10 trillion! A quote from a financial report:

"Lurking behind this rally is this unsurprising tidbit: consumer confidence in the United States hit an all-time low in October. The Conference Board reported that expectations have turned “significantly pessimistic with the percentage of consumers expecting business condition to worsen over the next 6 months rising to 36.6% from 21% and those expecting fewer jobs rising to 41.5% from 26.9%”

The confidence index is all important because it predicts human behaviour. If I may have been sounding pessimistic in my posts on this subject, it is for a reason. All the wishful thinking and as much as we would like to believe that this whole thing will just go away, it will not. I truly hope I am wrong but perhaps we are a very long way away from the bottom yet. I would like nothing better that to be proved wrong.