Limbo, limbo.

It's not all straight up or straight down, you know.

Why is it so hard to guess the top, or the bottom? Why do you only know in hindsight where the graph goes?

Once again, I turn to sports cards. Cards pretty much turned permanently downward for me around 1990, though I didn't know it until much later. But here is how it happened in real time.

Down month, down month, oh, oh, no wait a minute, a good a good month, another slightly good month, must have been an anomaly. Down month, down month, down month. Oh, crap. Up month! Up month! Oh, no, I'm running out of material! Down month, down month, down month, maybe I should start cutting orders (and yes, after 6 years of exponential growth, it took me a year to finally really start to react.) Down month, down month, and 6 more down months, and then 4 more and then,...boom, Shaquille O'Neal mania. Up months for 6 straight months!

Wait, fundamental problems haven't changed. Cut back. And then.....15 years down, down, down. Going from 85% sales to 5% sales.

And this happens with every boom and bust.

Eventually you get enough experience to ignore the minor upticks and minor downticks. You bet on a trend continuing.

That's where I'm at right now. It isn't so much that good news is outweighing bad news, but that there isn't enough conclusive news.

Well, yes there is, if you ignore the strange little starts and stutters that happen in every market.

Things of course are complicated by local conditions, both Bend and downtown, conditions in each of the industries, national conditions, personal positions, and most important to my figures right now, seasonality.

But you can't get distracted from the essential, core conditions. This is where sticking to your guns is most important. It's a huge advantage of experience. You can't let all the inexperienced people, who outnumber you probably 10 to 1, dissuade you from what you know in your gut.

So, I still think Bend has a couple more years of downturns, at the least. But there will be plenty of distractions along the way.