An Interesting Economic Indicator? Maybe?

One of my duties in my part time job is checking in new vehicles as they are delivered. Typically I don't do it often as usually it's the full time guy who gets stuck with it during the slower afternoon part of the day. Still every so often it falls to me.

I have noticed that most truck drivers really like to talk too. I guess being cooped up in that truck driving for hours with no company can make one kinda chatty and since the lot I work on is relatively easy to unload cars into they generally have more time to kill.

Anyway I had a rather sizeable delivery come in late yesterday and the driver told me he hasn't seen the railway lots so empty as they have been lately in the last five or six years. He claimed he is scrambling and pulling in favors to get deliveries assigned to him and several drivers have had to find other employment recently.

His tale doesn't really jive with recent headlines nor sales department claims but I must admit something is up as I am not seeing as many vehicles moving as I used to.

Could this auto bubble that has been elevating the economic figures be bursting? Has the market finally been saturated? Or is this simply a minor glitch in the flow? Maybe even the deranged observations of a mad man truck driver for all I know.

I will admit the driver then said something after that which really got my attention. He said the banks switched from home loans to car loans to keep em going and now that's coming to an end. Not many people I meet casually these days seem to take that kind of interest in macro-economics to even be able to state a claim like that so I kinda lean towards discounting the insane truck driver theory.

Maybe this is the first indicators of another looming economic downgrade? We will see I guess.

In other news well there isn't much. Two days of rain and working has left little time for progress around the Small-Hold. Then there was the rather lengthy nap I took this afternoon but hey as I said it was raining. We got almost 2 inches which should go a long way towards bringing us out of the "abnormally dry" rating we were in. The rain should also be helping the new posts settle better so I can get the gates hung in the next couple of days. It's been downright chilly too though. Personally I been loving the night time cold as it's been the perfect sleeping weather but everyone else around me is getting a bit sick of it.

Oh ya and our last two lambs were born yesterday. For some reason one ewe decided to deliver a month later than all the others. So 2016 lambing season is now officially over. We had 26 babies this year. 15 rams and 11 ewes. Only one single lamb birth and two sets of triplets. Not too bad considering we had the least amount of bred ewes in the last 3 years or so and a brand new untested ram. Only three bottle babies too and one vet visit for the whole season, which is a huge improvement over last year. Well I guess it was two vet visits we did have a ewe go toxic on us before it started which may have been pregnancy related. No deaths and only one real delivery complication that required human intervention during birth too. The other vet visit was a problem with an over large udder which is where the bottle babies came from. That ewe will now join the official retirement flock I guess.

Unless I thin the flock down a bit though next year's lambing season maybe busy because I have enough yearling ewes hanging around right now to double the number of ewes I breed. Can you imagine 50+ bouncing little lambs around the place?

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!!!