Never mind what the news says. What signs of the recession have you experienced?

I took a class about a year and a half ago. It was in a huge conference room with a table of food set out like it was a party. This week, I took the next class after it. It was put on by the same company. we even had the same instructor. This time though, we were in a dinky little hovel of a meeting room with some plain potato chips.

My wife and I like to eat out. Not so much at the fanciest le fancy-pantsy restaurants. A good BBQ joint will do. It was looking pretty slow at the local eateries for a while. We've seen it pick up some here recently.

My wife's employer has outsourced some of it's lower tier jobs and cut back on bonuses across the board. Even to the board. They got less last year, just like the rank and file. They have also had some RIFs. That's Reduction In Force. Some of that restructuring too. They were always moving stuff around before but, now they move a little more out the door when they do.

At the plant, we've seen some of our over time cut. They keep threatening to cut it all. Yeah. Right. We don't have enough personnel to do that because they won't hire enough. When they start really fussing, we offer to stay home instead of coming in to work on a basin or fill in for so and so at night. Maybe they'd like that project done tomorrow instead of us staying late today. That shuts them up for a week. We are on a raise freeze though. No one will get a raise this year from their evaluation. They are also slowing down the promotion process.

All in all, I'm weathering this thing like it aint a thing at all. Maybe I'd be better off if it wasn't but, we're still truckin'.

Wages are frozen at the library, even COLA. At restaurants, menus are shrinking and prices are going up. Our gas prices are still around $3/gal. The cost of a bus pass has doubled and routes have been dropped. In Seattle, the Seattle Public Library closes for a week with no pay.

There are more.

I noted more closed storefronts. Businesses which were just getting by before, are now forced to close.

The largest issue in our area are the abundance of unfinished neighborhoods, including our own. There are at least 6 I can think of off the top of my head with unfinished and boarded up homes. Empty lots and signs overgrown with foliage. Neighborhoods which never even built one house, or ones with only 3 when there should be 50 or more. These are 6 figure homes and neighborhoods. The builders and folding left and right, or just leaving town because of all they owe. In our neighborhood, air conditioning units in the unfinished homes have been smashed by the companies who didn't get paid to prevent the builders from using or selling them.

I used to find money once in a while when out for a walk but last week I instead found a bag of groceries. I guess this means people are holding on to thier money a little tighter but once it's spent thier grip on that value is a little looser.

The mayor and city here had planned to lay off over a hundred police and firemen because they did not have the money to pay them due to the fact that funds for police and firemen comes from sales tax collection which is way down because apparently people aren't spending as much as they once did before the recession. Not sure what the plan is now as the Republican mayor has been trying to get the remaining people to take pay cuts plus looking for some other source of money. Some cops have already been hired away to cities in Texas and surrounding states where money for fire and police comes from property taxes or some more reliable income source.

Another sign of the times is the streets and bridges here are in a mess. Street repair and construction is ongoing in many neighborhoods. The streets here are pathetic...full of leftover potholes from the winter ice storms. They keep filling and refilling them with hot asphalt. Sometimes that comes out and you have a double pothole within an old pothole.

What I have also noticed is that some of the restaurants here we used to frequent have begun to substitute cheaper and lower quality ingredients in their meals. We've stopped going to several, including a pseudo-Italian franchise place that kinda rhymes with Dolly Parton. The last spaghetti and meatballs I ordered there had meatballs made with almost no meat. Mostly it was breadcrumbs, egg, spices, and what tasted like veal, and the sauce tasted like it came out of a jar. Then we went to our favorite Mediterranean place and their food quality had dropped by about 50%.

The housing market here is in the slumps as well. Expensive homes over $400,000 aren't moving as well as they were, but a few people are still buying houses under $250,000.