Christmas Eve day

It was a nice day; an out of the ordinary day. The night before the coyotes were howling along the ridge to the west. We had a dusting of snow overnight and in the morning sun the snow sparkled brightly like diamonds. Very pretty. Even though the wind was calm, as I drove uptown, snow occasionally would fall off tree branches in a fluff. Again quite pretty.

I went uptown to get another camera. The Canon 1100 I was wanting was on sale at Best Buy at $149 - the same price as Amazon.com. Which is great as I wanted to buy a camera locally in case it was defective and I had to take it back. I noticed another Canon camera, the A1000, was on sale at Target ($159) and it looked interesting. I decided to check it out before buying the one at Best Buy. I found I liked the Canon A1000 even better. Target was sold out but it didn't matter as Amazon had it for $139.

So just when I thought I would get finally get a new camera, I changed my mind on what I wanted.

I didn't see too much traffic on the roads but the stores were full of shoppers. I didn't pay attention whether they were just looking or whether they were buying. After a few years of a super heated economy locally, and an unemployment rate of around 2%, life is different in Flathead Valley. The aluminum plant is closing due to high energy and materials costs and low prices for aluminum. Other manufacturing industries in the Valley are laying some people off. The unemployment rate is now the highest in the state at 7.5% and house foreclosures are rising rapidly. Welcome to the new economy.