About Hastings County, ON

Each month I post an update on the real estate market for the Quinte Region of Ontario, Canada at this address:

http://yourhomeinquinte.com/real_estate_news.htm

The good news this month is that there is strong evidence that market recovery is underway. After a series of month to month increases from January to April, and slight declines in May and June, July has proven to be one of the best months on record, with average residential prices back to within 1.6% of where they were at this time last year, and the combined dollar volume for all categories of sales coming in at a 32.4% increase over that of July 2008!

With low mortgage rates, and properties on the market that are still great values, it really is a good time to invest in real estate.

Our rural area in Quinte is one of tremendous contrasts.

The farmer who rents our land has recently put in two new methane digesters which will use cattle manure, field waste and even used restaurant grease to produce electricity. It's proven technology, and he will soon be supplying enough electricity to meet the needs of 400 homes. Amazing. I will try to post more about that in the future.

As an extreme contrast to that kind of technology, we are blessed to have Old Order Mennonites in our community. They don't like to have their picture taken, so I respect their wishes in that, but I have a rich supply of pictures in my head of these hard-working folk, running along the side of the highway in their carriages and wagons, delivering our supply of wood for the winter, and even one great scene where three young fellows had two horses pulling a wagon, followed by s second wagon that had a boat on it. They were off to a day of fishing with the original boat trailer!

Today I passed this scene in one of the local fields -

Aliens with floppy haircuts? No, just some hay drying, "bailed together" and almost reeady to collect. The bales were anything but square, though, so I looked around and spotted this old fashion bailer -



which would be horse-drawn, of course.

One thing that interests me is that we are all scrambling to find alternate fuels to deal with the depletion of oil reserves that will become a more acute problem very soon.

If oil goes to $300 a barrel, will these people even notice?

I'm dad or step-dad to 7 kids.

Our youngest daughter likes to look her best - though I think she looks great all the time anyway - and she has been part of the growing number of young people who use tanning beds on a regular basis.

The World Health Organisation has conducted an expert analysis of 20 studies and concluded that the risk of deadly skin melanoma is increaed by 75% when people start using tanning beds before age 30. Also, to quote from the article linked below - "Previous studies found younger people who regularly use tanning beds are eight times more likely to get melanoma than people who have never used them."

Here is a link to one news source with this article -

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/07/28/tanning-beds-cancer.html

My dad has had skin cancer for years, and the doctors tell him that it is not likely that it was caused from anything he has done recently. They blame the fact that he was always outside when he was young and that he had sunburn so often. To suggest that direct sunlight can cause these problems but that tanning beds are perfectly safe has never made sense to me.

I will be passing this information along to my daughter and discussing it with her. In the meantime, I thought it would be a good idea to post this link on my blog to help spread the word.

- Bob

One thing I like about real estate is that we do come up with unexpected bits of time when we are not busy, and it's fun to have the freedom to fill them with any activity we wish. That happened to me today - two clients this morning, birthday for my son tonight, but nothing I had to do this afternoons so ... I decided to try making rumtopf.

Ok. A little background.

In my former life as an educator I was privileged to have the chance to live in Germany for 3 years when I was teaching the children of military families over there. One of the things you heard about, but seldom saw, and even more seldom had a chance to sample, was the rumtopf. If was usually an earthen jar with a tight lid kept in European households. As fruits came into season, usually starting with strawberries, some of them were preserved by putting them into the rumtopf jar, putting sugar on them, then soaking them with rum or brandy. As the next fruit ripened, this was repeated, and so on until the jar was full.

Here's the basic recipe -

http://www.germandeli.com/rumtopfrecipe.html

I figured it would be a nice way to preserve the fruits of the season and enjoy a bit of brandy at the same time. The difference between what I wa doing, though, and the traditional practice, is that modern marketing means that we can pick up almost all the fruits, all the time, so I turned it into a 2 hour effort. Two grocery stores for fresh fruit, 1 bottle of brandy, a few sealed jars, lots of chopping, and we're done.

I doubt that my efforts will yield as good a product as the traditional one.. but it's definitely worth a shot.

I think my first sampling of this will be in about 6 weeks, when I will heat it gently (not to boiling), gently use a spoon to layer some fresh brandy on top of it, then touch it with a match to flambee it, and scoop it out to serve over french vanilla ice-cream.

Something to look forward to!

Is rumtopf new to you or something your family has done for generations?

Forty years ago today, I was a young teacher - 22 years old - and the television set in my classroom was set to one of the most amazing events in my lifetime.

A blurry figure of Neil Armstrong was seen descending a ladder to be the first human being to step on the moon. He has been criticized for perceived variations in what some people see as a missing "a" in the first comment any human ever made on the moon, but as I listened to a repeat broadcast tonight, I wondered if I would have taken any more time than he did to enunciate, "That's one small step for a man; a giant leap for mankind."

He was right, and remarkably so.

Today is not the day to ask what we have done since then, or to question the value of our adventure into space. Today is simply a time to remember the courage of the people who took on a near-impossible challenge in the 60's and succeeded. It is only now, in retrospect, that we can understand how close they were at all times to failure, and that makes their achievement all the more remarkable.