May Day.

I was going to write a long blog about May Day (International Workers Day) filled with Communist jargon, "Welcome, Comrades!" and concluding with: "Workers of the world unite!" behind Obama.

But then I realized there are plenty of sites that actually believe exactly that.

Oh, well.

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The Bulletin has decided that Cessna left because the airport didn't build the tower. I suspect they would have left, with or without.

More Infrastructure! Hmmmm. Wasn't the the whole point of Juniper Ridge? Now they're telling us that, even if we had built J.R. we wouldn't have had the "road, sewer, and water..." infrastructure? Kind of putting the cart before the horse.

Actually, that had already come to bite us, with the intersection at Cooley Rd.

We need to grab us some of that there stimulus money!

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Someone wrote a guest editorial in the Bulletin that was even more downbeat than I am. I agree with his next two stages of crisis: credit card and commercial real estate. But the next three are too speculative even for me.

It's funny, though, that when I did my original guesstimates about what I thought would happen, I knew from experience that it would be bad. In every bubble I've seen, it burst deeper and longer than you can believe.

But as we got closer and closer to the actual event, I couldn't quite go there.

It was too dire to contemplate.

Now, as events have played out, I've resurrected my original estimates, and I've resumed planning based on them.

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I kind of fell off the budgeting wagon in April. I got caught by the fact that business was much better than I expected. I bought at the peak, -- again! -- and then sales fell off the last week of the month -- again! My wife is right; I really am Wily Coyote.

No harm if I budget strictly for May and June.

I forgot that I budget not for bad months-- because discipline then is self-reinforcing.

No, it's important I stick to budget during good months, because that's when I can get carried away.

Buying too much product is my Achilles Heel.

It's probably the least harmful of ways to overspend. After all, I still have the product to sell. Or maybe that's just Wily Coyote thinking. (This Acme Kit will work!)

But it traps all my profit in inventory.

So it's back to the drawing board. I made it through the first three months of the year without relapsing; now I just need to get back on track for the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, the store is stocked, stocked, stocked! Come one, come all!