Mission - Cliff Bungalow

Snapshot of housing sales in my area in the past 6 months.

House - 1580 sq feet with average price of 706,000 dollars

Townhouse - 1858 sq feet with average price of 683,000

Condo - 765 sq feet with average price of 309,000.

Red Deer

This is one of the many trips I've made to this town. It's about 100,000 people, situated exactly between Calgary and Edmonton, so it makes for a good stop to go pee. There is an area known as "Gasoline Alley" which houses a bunch of restaurants, hotels and...of all things, a Harley Dealership. The better places to eat are on the south bound side of the highway. Usual fast food right through to sit down and eat food places.

Red Deer starts in the south with a massive block of chain stores, typical of most cities in Canada. It's a fairly large place & home to alot of people driving large trucks. I went through what I assume was downtown & it's not a terrible place. There is a college in Red Deer which seemed fairly large and the rumour is it's a city full of available women (the guys are all off working on the rigs).

At Red Deer, you start to notice the landscape of Alberta begins to change. The prairie ends & you get into rolling country side with way more trees. It's actually nice to see trees again, I like the open prairie, but it's a rather dull drive. Around Red Deer is where you stop being able to see the mountains. Red Deer seems to be the butt of jokes but I didn't notice anything unusual nor hear any wild banjo playing. Perhaps I've become accustomed to the western lifestyle (like how I don't think it's unusual to wear a cowboy hat to a mall....tho I would have thought that was insanity in Ontario).


Leaving Red Deer for Lacombe, Ponoka and a place called Hobbema

Carstairs - Olds - Bowden - Innisfail

The first small town I stopped in was Carstairs. To start with, it has it's own pirate radio station at 88.5 FM playing the best in modern & hick country music. I've no idea where the signal comes from, but it covers about 3 kms and was powerful enough to walk over my sat radio (and I have the old kind the FCC don't like). The downtown looks much like a 'western" town. A very wide main street with buildings that are very far apart. A few of the buildings are boarded up, the rest are populated by small independent businesses. I stopped to eat there in a bar at the edge of town. It's much like what you'd see in a country music video, the boys out for a beer after work & the waitress talking about her pregnancy with the customers. It was clear everyone knew everyone & they probably wondered WTF I was doing there. While in there, I heard a song called "International Harvestor"...a country song about a 3rd generation farmer that likes driving his combine on the highway very slowly to piss off the city people. I have to admit, I found the song amusing and it's at least genuine. The rest of the town is a couple of hundred new houses, presumably populated by people who live there & drive to Calgary to work (it's about 65 kms).

Olds

Olds is a small city much like Carstairs. The one thing that differentiates it is that it has a college (Olds College). The grounds look pretty nice & the building seemed nice, but I found it odd there wasn't any "scene" around the school. Perhaps I've grown up in cities for too long, but I'm not sure I'd want to attend post secondary education in such a rural place.

Innisfail

Not much to report here. I took 2A through this town which was a mind numbing mistake as it becomes a gravel sideroad for a while due to construction. It's like most Alberta towns, it has a few businesses and a CO OP. A CO OP is a grocery chain in the West that is locally owned and broken down into regions. You buy into the store & then at the end of the fiscal year, they calculate how much you spent and send a cheque back to you. I'm presuming it was Alberta's method of supporting it's "own". The one in Calgary I shop at is called the Midtown Market & it's really nice. I also buy all my gas there too, so I get 10 cents back at the end of the year (per litre).

Edmonton Bound

This weekend I went to Alberta's capital city. The locals call it "E Town" or "Edmonchuk". People in the east seem to believe it's the western cousin of Buffalo, NY. So now I shall bore you with my trip there & what I thought of the city

I decided to take Highway 2A rather than take Highway 2, just for the sake of doing something different. Plus, if I drive slower, I save gas ;-).

Just past Airdrie, which is essentially a suburb of Calgary now, you exit Hwy 2 and get onto Hwy 2A. Airdrie, if you're interested is just a large suburb of a city & I didn't find a specific downtown. Airdrie is about 25 kms from downtown Calgary and based on traffic, I would say it's the last "commuting point" for people. Pretty much everyone exits the highway in Airdrie.

Stop 1...

Misguided Masses

I am often amused when I read about the "witch hunt" going on to blame whoever for the rising price of oil. It's the government, it's speculators, it's Jesus himself, blah blah blah.

A few weeks ago oil topped out at 147 bucks a barrel. At that time there was serious "demand destruction" in the USA. Demand destruction is a term used when people stop buying something because of the high cost. The US is consuming 1 million barrels a day LESS of liquid fuel than it was just a few months ago. So..the price of oil has fallen to 118 bucks as I write this.

If you're blaming speculation for pushing up prices, you're misguided. Oil contacts can be traded "long" (where you wait for the price to go up) or SHORT where you buy high and sell low & you make a profit (yes, you can do that). If the run up in prices was because of the speculators, then obviously the decrease must be for the same reason. It's simply illogical to assume that falling demand has brought down prices /end sarcasm

The free market is an ugly thing sometimes. People love the free market...when it's on their side, but hate it when it's not on their side. You have to take the good AND the bad. The run up in oil has been constant over the past 6 years. In 1999 oil was 10 bucks a barrel & it's been increasing regularly excluding the odd pull back.

Why? Geologists (the people that understand fossil fuel extraction) call it Peak Oil. It's where you reach the plateau of production and afterwards it's a long ride down. And it's effing ugly. Google Peak Oil...then stop blaming the speculators. And stop buying so much gas for your giant SUV ;_

Unless you live under a rock, you're probably aware we're going thru an energy crisis. There are alot of people who blame speculators for the rise in oil prices...but oil contracts are bought both long & short...meaning speculators would have to be responsible for price increases on the up and downside. The real issue in the oil industry is the lack of easily attainable supply and the growing demand. The spread between what we can extract & what we're burning is tight. Of late.."demand destruction" is hitting the market as people just stop driving because they can't afford it. It's always interesting to hear an America feel that gas prices are a "crisis" at 4 bucks a gallon when a gallon of gas in most of Europe is 10 dollars.

I decided that living in the oil capital of the free world..I would go entirely green in my new condo. I started by buying wind power which is available either through Greenmax or Bullfrog Energy. They monitor your electrical bill and if you use 500 kw of electricity, they produce 500 kw using wind power & inject it in to the system on your behalf. You pay a minor fee on top of your power bill to cover the extra cost of wind. The cost for me was a whole 2 dollars in a month.

Aside from going 100% "wind", I bought LED lights for my house, ditched my microwave & decided I'd make a conscious effort to cook all my food from scratch. There are times it's annoying and it requires you plan meals, but the savings are surprising. The food also tastes much better than what you buy at the store.

I also ditched using paper towels and went old skool using clothes to wipe up things. Yes, I have to wash them, but my laundry load isn't any more than it was before I did this. Any types of paper I use are entirely recycled. I also try to buy local food & not drive my car unless I'm using it for work.

So far, it's working. It's taken a bit to get used too, but I actually find I'm less stressed & living simple makes your life incredibly relaxing. Now I just need to get a job where I don't drive and walk to work...a very viable option when one is living in downtown Calgary.

First 2 weeks I used 51 KW of electricity. My electrical bill for nearly 3 weeks was about 12 dollars.

Rain

Picture of a rainbow after a thunderstorm taken from the Safeway parking lot at 4th Street SW & Elbow Drive.