New high for the year

The S&P 500 closed at a new high for the year after Monday's session.  Gold, meanwhile, was down, a bit unusual in an environment where dollar strength or weakness is driving most of the action of both stocks and commodities.

There are still plenty of warning alarms going off.  You can't raise interest rates the way Jay Powell has and not end up with a correction or a crash or something.  Those chickens will come home to roost at some point.  It's just a matter of when and how many.

There are rumors of a new disease on the way, another 2020-style pandemic.  There are also rumors of other catastrophes, things like cyber attacks.  I don't know how much credence to give those rumors, if any, but I know that a Presidential election year is a good time for something crazy to happen.  Just as the stock market crashed in March of 2020, so might it do the same in 2024.  And, as in 2020, there might be a nice buying opportunity when everyone panics and drives prices down to highly discounted levels.  I missed the great buying opportunity of 2009 due to my own fear; I promised myself I would never make that mistake again.

As things currently stand, the market is making new highs, and that's a bullish signal.  It's also overbought, though, according to oscillators like the RSI, and the MACD has turned slightly downward in what is usually considered a bearish signal.

I think the tiebreaker here is the matter of gaps.  The sessions gapped up several times in recent weeks, and those gaps have yet to be filled.  I think the market wants to consolidate recent gains, and I think it will, but I also think fundamentals and election-motivated media hysteria in the first quarter of 2024 might drive it down further than it currently wants to go.

R.I.P., David Drake

I admit I haven't read much of David Drake's work.  I started one of his books years ago--I think it was Redliners--but just couldn't get into it.  I abandoned it and never tried his stuff again.

Nevertheless, Drake was an important part of the science fiction scene, particularly the mil-SF part.  There's no denying his popularity, and he'll be missed.

And perhaps I'll give another of his books a chance some day.  It's not really fair, after all, to judge an author by only one of that author's books.

But even though I'm not yet a fan, there are certainly plenty of others who are, and I sympathize with them now.  Drake was a big name, and his absence leaves a big hole.

R.I.P., man.

The stuff of dreams

A few nights ago, I had a strange dream.  In my dream, I was talking to an old friend I haven't talked to in a number of years.  He then mentioned a trip to Tokyo we had both taken years earlier and which I had completely forgotten about.  Images from the trip flashed into my mind, including a party on the beach.  Dream-me couldn't believe I had forgotten the trip.

In real life, though, I've never been to Tokyo.  I've never been anywhere in Asia.  The trip and the memories of it were completely fabricated by my subconscious.

For a long time, I've thought of dreaming as a way for the subconscious to sort of expunge itself of clutter.  It picks a few memories fed to it by conscious perception, and then it mixes them together and takes a little joy ride down the strange path it has created.

The Tokyo thing, though, doesn't make any sense in that regard.  There are no memories from which the subconscious can draw.  The only exceptions are movies and tv shows that take place there.  Maybe my subconscious pulled something from there.  But it's been years since I've seen anything set in Tokyo, so why would my dreaming brain call it up now when it usually draws from more recent imagery?  What was the spark?

I don't have any answers to these questions.  It's the fact that the questions themselves exist that I find interesting.  I have no explanation for the thoughts in my own head, and that's really a mind-boggling thing to consider.  The subconscious mind is truly an unexplored frontier.  "Here be dragons," as the old saying goes.  Or, in this case, here be a beach in Tokyo.

Farewell, little ones

I haven't seen a male hummingbird at the feeders since Wednesday or Thursday.  I suspect they're already gone.

The females are still around, but I'm guessing they'll vanish within the next week.

I'll miss the little winged critters.  They're cheap entertainment.  It's a shame we only get to have them around for half the year.

Good luck traversing the Gulf of Mexico, little ones, and I hope to see you again in March.

Luna-25 is down :(

The Russian lunar lander that was scheduled to prowl around the moon's south polar region has crashed.

https://www.rt.com/russia/581531-russian-lunar-moon-probe/

The Russian space agency Rocosmos stated, "According to the results of a preliminary analysis… the Luna-25 spacecraft switched to a non-designated orbit and ceased to operate due to a collision with the surface of the Moon."

It sucks for the Russians, but this is the reality of doing space stuff.  Catastrophes happen from time to time.  NASA and SpaceX have certainly had their share.  There's nothing to do about it but learn what went wrong so you can do better next time.

Hopefully the Indian lander will have better luck.  We'll see on Wednesday.

A familiar feeling

Friday was hot and humid, 96 degrees with 66% humidity for a heat index of 120 degrees.  A pop-up thunderstorm appeared that night, dropped a lot of rain and lit up the sky with nonstop lightning and caused a brief power outage, and then just as quickly vanished from the Doppler radar.

This is a typical pattern for this region and this time of year.

However, there's something familiar about it.  Not just one day's weather, but the pattern of the summer so far.  It's not something I can explain.  It's something the "lizard brain" part of my brain is keying on, some instinct that is trying to tell me that we've been here before.  Sort of like deja vu, but not quite.  More like history repeating itself in a way that's too subtle for me to pick up other than subconsciously.

It feels like the summer of 1996.

If that's the case--if history is repeating itself and 2023 is in the same part of the cycle as 1996--then a major drought is just around the corner.  

The drought of 1998-2000 was almost Biblical in scale.  By the time late July of 2000 arrived, mature oak trees were dropping their leaves.  These were the trees with the deepest roots and which provide constant shade over the ground beneath them, and they can be stubborn about dropping their leaves to the point that some of them linger on the branches throughout winter.  For them to start dropping leaves in July is simply unfathomable, but it happened.

For me, it felt like the end of the world.  It was dismaying and demoralizing, and I was genuinely worried the region was going to become a desert.

In August of 2000, everything changed.  It began to rain that month.  Not the quick sprinkle that had occasionally happened during the drought and failed to provide any relief, but a serious rain.  And it kept raining for the whole day.  And the next day.  And the next.

For a whole week, it basically rained nonstop.  It would trail off to a drizzle at times, but it never stopped.  By the end of that week, the yard was peppered with mushrooms and the whole outdoors smelled like mildew.  The drought had broken good and hard, and it was obvious to me at the time.  I'm no meteorologist, but I knew it instinctively.  It's like when you have a fever and then you suddenly break out in a sweat.  You're still weak and sickly feeling, but you know the fever has broken, and you know you've started down the road to normalcy.  It was the same way with the drought.

Of course, the local news yokels continued to moan about the drought and the deficit and the lake level and all that.  They would pretend the drought was still ongoing for a few more years, actually, even when the lake had reached full pool.  But that's tv people for you, I guess.

So now my bones are telling me that this summer is an echo of 1996.  If so, then a drought starting in 2025 is what one would expect.

I hope it doesn't happen.  I hate droughts, and I loathe the idea of repeating anything from those horrible years of my life.

Add in my fears of economic woes coming to fruition at about the same time, and...

Well, let's just hope we get luckier than we deserve.

Smashwords July Sale!

I'm participating in the big Smashwords sale going on this month.  

 

All of my novels are 50% off the usual price.  My short stories are FREE.

Here's the promotional link: 

https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/

Put my name in the search box at the top and you'll see my books.

Clouds of Venus is still permafree as usual.

Check it out.  Tell your friends.  :D