Home at Last

We arrived home safe and sound yesterday. We managed to keep the jet lag to a minimum by an old trick of forcing ourselves to stay away through two long flights. By the time we were on the west coast, we were sufficiently exhausted to sleep all the way through the night and wake up totally on West Coast time. It doesn't work perfectly, but minimizes the amount of jet lag we experience. By Thursday or Friday we'll be a bit strung out, but it should last only a couple of days. Until then, I can fake coherence.

Obviously nothing of substance took place while I was gone. The Oregonian seems to have had an article extolling the management of PERS and lavishing praise on the Board, which has taken a large deficit and converted it to a $1.75 billion surplus. No mention is made of the fact that the unions predicted this would happen by a market change without any reform. Surprise, surprise, the stock market has been on a roll since 2003 with new records being broken daily. Little wonder the PERS fund is as healthy as it is. Now, if the public could only understand that it was market forces that put PERS in the hole in the first place, not outsized public employee pensions. But I'll be dead before the Oregonian or the public makes that admission.

While I was gone, I decided to change my image a la London style. You can see the results of this change here. It just seem appropriate for me so that I can continue to remain low profile. Sorry for the image quality. No flash permitted and I didn't have a tripod handy. Even Photoshop couldn't clean up the blur, but you'll get the point anyway.