Suburbia

Kaady Car Wash has upped their price again. An economy wash now costs $7. "Seven dollars for a car wash!?!" I scream to myself, and then I remember it's not that people are raising prices in order to gouge you, it's just that the dollar is worth less every day.
    A while back, a few years maybe, I was seeing articles regularly bemoaning the short-sighted approach to business of the bean counters who were harping about quarterly returns and if they weren't high enough you should abandon ship, or bring out the lash and start beating your employees more.
    Problem wasn't that the bean counters were being short sighted. Problem was that the value of the dollar was plumetting. If you weren't getting a return of at least 15%, you were sliding toward the abyss. If you make any money then the government is going to want a third of it, and a third of 15% is 5%. Inflation is running right around 5%. Five and five makes ten, take ten from fifteen and you are left with five. So your vaunted 15% ROI is actually only worth about 5% in real money. So, yes, you better be making your quarterly benchmarks or you might as well be packing your bags.

    I checked the sunroof on the SUV before I went to the carwash and I noticed that the back edge had dropped down about a quarter of an inch which was disturbing because I thought I had fixed this problem, so I checked the blocks I had wedged under the rear corners of the sunroof and sure enough one of them had fallen over. I shoved it back into position. It did it's job, no water came in around the sunroof when I went through the car wash. Well, a few drops may have come in but they were caught by the gutter, so it works as well as it ever did.
    I took a photo of the blocks thinking I would post them here, but when I got home I discovered that the memory card in my Lumix waterproof camera was not properly seated and there were no photographs to be had. Hmmph. Never happened with my Canon Sureshot. Lens is still clear of dust. However I have found the upper left corner of a number of images obscured by some black blob - the tip of my finger. Comes from having the lens in the upper left corner of the camera. I try and remember that but sometimes I forget. Grrrrr.