Unemployment and Other Stuff

We heard on the news last night that Kern County now has an unemployment rate of 17%. That's like twice the national average and the number of people is somewhere around 63,000. So I'm thinking that if McDonalds is looking for one counter person they're going to get about 10,000 applicants.

The schools have run out of money again so they are going to be laying off even more teachers, adding to that 63,000 people out of work.

They are telling us that there is good news because a couple of projects are in the works, a big development is being planned with retail, a movie theatre, housing, offices, etc. all in a big master planned community thing down the road from us. But I highly doubt that most of those 63,000 people are in the construction trade or want to work at the movie theatre or the yogurt shop or whatever the retail will be where they will earn a big fat minimum wage paycheck.

Plus, the ground hasn't even been broken yet and won't be for another year or so.

Or they could go work in the new gold mine. I'm not sure where this gold mine is (yes, apparently a real gold mine) but I'm kind of doubting that most of the unemployed would be qualified to work in a gold mine, either.

One of the biggest reasons for the high unemployment is the agriculture industry here, the farmers can't get any water to grow crops so they are letting the fields lie fallow and farm workers can't tend and pick crops that aren't being grown. There is one little town here that has 35% unemployment because most of the residents are farm workers.

So, I guess it's a good thing that Keith still has a job, yes?

It's been a slow week for me, sales are very slow which makes me not very ambitious to work on new things or really do a whole lot of anything. I did walk over to Target yesterday to pick up a few things and went to look at the books (my favorite section of Target) and found this interesting looking cookbook.


I flipped through the book and was sold. She's got recipes for cheap easy meals and includes all of the ingredients for a complete dinner with the vegetables or other side and the directions for cooking the complete meal including the sides all in the one recipe. The first one that really caught my eye was for grilled chicken and zucchini pizza with homemade wheat pizza dough where she adds some italian seasoning and parmesan to the dough and even gives you a recipe for the pizza sauce. The other recipes are all similar with ingredients that are simple, no fancy spices that you can only find at specialty stores, no weird gourmet type concoctions. Just plain simple cheap healthy food. I'm hoping that the recipes will taste as good as they sound. As soon as we have more grocery money I'll be trying quite a few of them.

Last night we had like four cats on the bed and Keith wanted to lay down for a few minutes. Buddy likes to curl up by his side but somebody else was already there so he had to settle for putting his big solid heavy body right on Keith's chest. This was his favorite spot when he was a kitten, but he barely fits now.