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I looked down at the snowstorm of crumbs stuck to my tray-table, then up at the two gossiping slobs adorned in Alaska Airlines uniforms. Mid plane, they were slouched over opposite seats, ignoring the passengers who were jamming check-in sized luggage into the overhead compartments. Heck, they even ignored my handsome smiling arse as I walked by.

It was going to be a rough trip home.

About 30 hours later I rolled back into Tas, with a rotten case of tonsillitis ravaging my throat. Apportioning blame was going to be tough; the cabbage fart smelling air of the most gangsta city in Canada; the filthy state of the Alaska Airlines plane; or overloading on episodes of Two & a Half Men on the way home.

Whatever the culprit, I've been wallowing in self pity and penicillin for the past week and suspected if I didn't get back bloggerizing the real estate industry with self indulgent vitriol, I may never get back to it at all.

While away, I marvelled at the invention Josef Fritzl gave a bad name - the basement. Noting that in the northern BC city of Prince George (Launceston size), having a finished one (non dungeon style) could give you two extra bedrooms and potentially two extra bathrooms.

A little gaudy, but that's a 5x3 for $289k with the AUD and CAD close to parity. Sure, as I mentioned, the Prince George air can be a little wild, but given the winter stink that can hover over Launceston, causing the BOM to suggest asthma sufferers and the elderly should barricade themselves inside, or warn anyone out for a jog maybe they shouldn't breathe too deep - we might be looking at comparable cities here. Both with the scourge of fine particles looking to rape your lungs.

Oh yeah, there's the crime issue but given small business and retail continues to falter - 80 Tasmanian businesses hit the wall last year - unless you're part of the ever ballooning team of government advisors (the only area of growth in Tasmania), silver tonguing the bovine populous you have complete contempt for, you may end up cooking meth, running a crack shack or growing weed to get by.

Crime will be the Tasmanian growth industry of 2011 and as the wheels fall off, the Liberals will scream but offer no solutions, Labor will scream at the Liberals for screaming and the Greens will continue their silence in the assumption they're portraying a responsible part of democracy because Labor offered them a seat at the big table. Chalk a win for those government advisors - bring the only real opposition into the fold and sideline them from debate.

Despite the Canadian bubble, good luck finding anything even resembling that Starbucks coloured mansion under $350k in Tasmania. 

We have a long way to fall and all the factors leading to that fall are beginning to line up.