"GKgloc" wrote in message
...
....snip

I think of myself a real person, and I'm sure everyone in this group works
very
hard for their income. During the week, I work for a company that builds
flight simulators and human centrifuges, on the weekends, I'm a skydiving
instructor. So I use my skydiving income to pay for my aviation
addiction. So
essentially, except for rainy weekends, I work 7 days a week.

Of course, and I really do hope you don't think I meant to imply otherwise
or take any offense at my post. My work has recently hit a late summer
doldrum that has really forced us to severely economize, including putting
my flight training on hiatus for a couple or three months. Relative incomes
are a frequent topic of discussions my wife and I have been having,
comparing our current income with the things we want to do and I'm perplexed
by the apparent income indicated by the lifstyles of many of our
contempories. There sure seem to be an awful lot of people out there that
can afford $250,000 homes and $65,000 SUV's and summer cottages by the lake
and etc etc etc and to my perception such assets are so common as to pretty
much define "normal," the middle of the middle class, the "average" suburban
dweller. Driving through the suburbs outside of a city like Toronto they go
on for miles and miles and there are far more people there than can be
accounted for by the number of surgeons and big business senior managers -
most of these people have got to be are just ordinary college-educated
white-collar working people like me. Drive past the developments and you
see the signs that read "Semi-detached 3 bedroom town homes starting at ONLY
$329,000" outside a subdivision with hundreds of units under construction.
But the census bureau tells us that middle class households gross somewhere
on the order of 35 kilobucks per year. Uhhhh, you don't by a quarter
million dollar plus house on a 35 k income and I don't believe those
numbers. So something doesn't jive and I've come to the conclusion that I
really don't have a clue what people really do or earn and how to go about
negotiating similar situations for myself. I'm not jealous that you can
afford a 3.5 kilobuck watch (well, maybe a little g) -if anything I don't
consider it to be all THAT unusual, they must sell enough of them to be able
to tool up the production line - but it's certainly a stratospheric expense
according to my chequebook, as are the house and the SUV and the cottage
that most of the people I think as my peers seem easily to afford, and I'm
trying to figure out what h**l I've been doing wrong the last 30 years
grin.