The Lonely Me

I've been in a very bad and difficult place for the past few months owing to a life-changing event that I had to deal with at the beginning of the year - an event that's too personal for me to explain publicly what it was.

I've had some unexpected expenses that have forced me to spend more money since this event occurred, mainly because several things around the house have broken all at once.  This past March, I put a couple of cookies into my microwave oven for a minute, and when I went to get them . . . the door wouldn't open.  Not only did I have buy a new microwave ovwn, I had to wait to throw out the old one until the local electronics-recycling event - two months after. In early January,  the German mantel clock in the living room kept stopping and I paid a king's ransom to get it fixed.  After about a month or so, it kept losing time - not good when you live on a block like mine that's prone to power outages and you need as many clocks that don't run on the power grid as possible.  After repeated attempts to get the clock to keep accurate time - which I finally achieved - it started stopping again, and after shifting it back and forth one time too many to get it to keep going, I stopped it permanently.  Too discouraged to spend more money on it, I placed it in a closet and replaced it with an el cheapo plastic bell-curve-shaped mantel clock that runs on battery power.  I have no plans to repair the old mantel clock in the near future.

At the same time, I've been having trouble sleeping at night.  I fall asleep easily, but I wake up at three or four in the morning and have to try to fall asleep again.  This means I tend to feel tired during the day and fall asleep at the most inopportune times.  A few days ago, I turned on a podcast and sat in one of the easy chairs in the living room - another recent purchase, to replace a pair of easy chairs that were worn beyond repair - and listened to the podcast.  It was about 1:55 P.M.  A few minutes later, I looked at the very mantel clock I'd bought to replace the old one and it said 2:35 P.M.  I thought that either it had malfunctioned or that it was so small and far from the chair that I couldn't see it well enough.  No.  It was 2:35 P.M.  I'd fallen asleep while listening to the podcast - a very lively one at that - which, by the time I'd woken up, was almost over.  (I listened to it again later.)         

So I've been in an awful way lately.  But I think I've been able to stop spending money for awhile - bar only a few pending one-time expenses for the rest of this month - and I just got myself a couple of new acquisitions that I think will be a sure-fire cure for my blues and my exhaustion.  What are they?  Tune in tomorrow and you'll find out.

Dubai-ous Goals

Somewhere between the bloviating on Tiger Woods's car accident and reaction to a speech on Afghanistan that President Obama hasn't given yet, few people have noticed and fewer people seem to care about the precarious state the emirate of Dubai is in.

Dubai, a part of the United Arab Emirates and one of the few places on the Arabian Peninsula that has little if any oil, has been building itself up as a fantastic tourist destination through the the will and the personality of its emir. Dubai has constructed several skyscrapers housing offices, apartments and hotels, looking like wet-drip sand castles, along with man-made islands in the Persian Gulf, an indoor skiing facility, and a $100 million golf course (designed by Tiger Woods). Rents and sales of these properties were supposed to enrich the small emirate, but such deals have fallen short of these expectations, as much of Dubai's real estate stock was built with - you guessed it - borrowed money, and the emir can't pay his bills.

Dubai has turned to the more fiscally conservative Abi Dhabi for aid, which may come with strings attached. It must be understood that the United Arab Emirates are not a strong federation like the United States is, and this is evident by my use of the plural person with the former and the singular person with the latter. The seven sheikdoms that make up the union are largely autonomous, with their own set of laws and a federal government run by a Supreme Council to manage foreign affairs. The president of the U.A.E. is usually the emir of Abu Dhabi, where the federation's capital is located, and the prime minister is usually . . . the emir of Dubai. Abu Dhabi will almost certainly help out Dubai to preserve the union, but will insist on strict terms for any loans it makes.

So what does Dubai have to do with Dubuque? Well, if there's a good deal of American money invested in Dubai's exorbitant earthly paradise, that could rattle the banks and investment firms in this country, which could have a ripple effect on the U.S. economy as a whole. Apparently, though, it's not seen as major problem on Wall Street . . . yet. Stock prices dipped a bit in half-day trading on Friday, when the Dubai crisis erupted, but the market seems to be on an uptick now.

Stay tuned.