Last night, with an open LL Bean catalog on my desk, I went to the website to order a flannel shirt for Jonah. Jonah said that he wanted one for Christmas. My kid wants clothes for Christmas? The kid who once wore Ian's pants to school for the day and never noticed that they ended half way up his calf? Oh, kid, stop growing up!

So, I went to the LL Bean website and looked for flannel shirts with the fleece lining. While I was there, I figured that I would get Steve one, too. Everything was sold out. At Lands End, the pickins were slim, too.

Does that mean that people are shopping a lot or businesses are keeping their inventories low? 

In the midst of the usual insanity of December, I've been getting quotes on doing some small projects around the house. This morning, the asbestos removers are scheduled to show up. They are supposed to don space suits and pull the nasty stuff off the pipes in the basement.

We also need to deal with the leaky tub in the bathroom. The bathroom is a big mess for two reasons. One, we only have one full bath in this house. If that bathroom is out of service, then I'm going to be showering at the gym for a month. Two, in these old homes, they used to pour cement in the floor boards under bathrooms. In order to fix the tub, they have do a major demo job of the floor and pull out all that 100 year old cement and layers of tile. Hopefully, when the pull out the cement, a big chunk won't fall through the ceiling in the new kitchen. It's a huge mess.

I've been calling in contractors to give us quotes on the bathroom mess.

I love talking to contractors. They are full of gossip about business and people. They are the miner's canary for the economy. I like them better than Bloomberg for telling me when things are going to pick up.

They didn't have much good news for me. One guy said that he knew a year ahead of time that the housing bubble was going to burst. He said that he saw young couples putting in expensive additions on their homes. The money was too easy. So, he started socking away money back then, and he was glad that he did, because he's been living off savings for the past few years. He said that a lot of his competition went out of business and that he no longer turns away any job, no matter how small. He wasn't seeing any increase in business, though he thought that things might get better in February or March after Wall Street got their bonuses.

The quotes that I'm getting for the bathroom mess are a good 10 grand cheaper than quotes that we got five years ago. So, my procrastination is finally paying off. Score! The real estate agent told us to do the cheapest possible job on the bathroom, because we wouldn't recoup any of the expenses if we sold the house today. Fixing the tub was necessary to sell the house, but a new bathroom would be waste in this economy.

The asbestos dudes are downstairs right now. I can hear thumps and guys arguing in Russian. The first of three boring, long-ignored home repair projects is being crossed off the list. In addition to clean air and a working tub, I've accumulated some anecdotes and sad tales.