No Lie.

And this is where my plane crash landed. It wants to escape so bad.

Ouch!

It's important to take pens out of your shirt pocket before cuddling.

Lots of Work

Working a lot isn't much fun at all. My current work schedule is as follows: Mondays I go to work at PCCI at 9:45am and leave at 2pm. I start working at Chrysalis at 3pm and work till Tuesday morning at 9am. At 10am I head back to PCCI and work till around 6:30 (give or take an hour depending on the day). This little Monday/Tuesday dance is repeated for Wednesday/Thursday. On Fridays I work at PCCI from 10am till 7:30pm (also give or take an hour or so).


Don't get me wrong, I love getting the pay checks. It's also nice to have the weekends off. Lately, though, i've just been so exhausted in my time off that all I do is lay on my living room floor as my body attempts to relax and I just think of how happy I am not to be working. Hmmm.... I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. I'm thining that i'll chat with my boss at PCCI the first of next week and see what I can do to not work so much. It's just killing me.

One lesson (of many) I learned while living in New York is that money isn't everything. Yeah I know, it's cliche, but it's true. I came to find out that the average New Yorker has a different outlook on life than I did. Their view was to work as hard as you can every day at work so that you can rise to the top and be successful. I admire their determination, but I have a different outlook. I think we need to work hard and do what we need to do to be succesful at work for the purpose of supporting the rest of our lives. The ONLY reason i'm at work is to make all the time i'm not at work possible. I don't care if i'm successful in my job, as long as I think the rest of my life is succesful. It's just a means to an end. For this reason, having a family business would be pretty sweet. It takes away the worst part of work; being away from family.

Gas....

While watching the news this morning I noticed that the national average per gallon of gas rose a few more cents overnight. The current average price is $3.55 for regular and will probably raise a few more cents by the time i'm done typing this.

The price of gas has more than tripled in the eight years i've been driving. Why such an increase? Why now? I'm already broke as it is!

I googled the phrase "why are gas prices so high?" and met a bunch of different answers. Most seemed to be about one conspiracy theory or another. As much as aliens want to mess with us by driving up gas prices, I knew that most likely it was something more down to earth.

I then looked into the price of crude oil, since that's where we get gasoline and I ran into this little graph:


According to this graph oil prices per barrel are 5 times as high as they were when I started driving which tells me that even if oil prices level off we've still got some price hikes at the pump coming our way.

So what causes oil prices to rise? Greed seems to be on the top of everyone's list, but I don't really buy that. I searched around and found two pretty sound reasons oil prices have gone up so fast lately.

1. Short Supply. I guess my 7th grade science teacher was right after all. The world really WILL run out of oil some day... It turns out that they drill for oil in the places that are the cheapest and easiest to drill. There's more oil out there, but it's really expensive to get to. The more money they spend getting the oil, the more they charge when they sell it.
Most countries scaled back drilling oil wells almost 30 years ago when there was an overproduction of oil which caused oil prices to drop by half. Now we're feeling the effects of that scale back.
Also, with political unrest in Venezuela, Africa, and Iraq, getting oil from these critical regions is a lot tougher than it used to be.

2. The Weak Dollar. Oil is traded in US$. As the worth of the dollar plummets, everything that is traded in dollars becomes more expensive. For example: In 2000, when oil was $25 per barrel, you could buy a barrel for 30 euros. Currently, with oil at around $115 per barrel, you can get a barrel for about 73 euros. That is an increase of $90 (345%) per barrel, but only an increase of 43 euros (143%). If the dollar were as strong as the euro, we would probably be looking at gas prices of around $2.25 per gallon, which I would take in a second after seeing today's $3.55 price tag.

I Can't Wait..... Literally

I think there are a few different kind of patience. There's the kind of patience you show by sitting through a boring class. There's the kind you use when someone asks you a million questions in a row. These types of patience are obviously beneficial to mankind. It allows us to be productive and not kill each other so much. But then there's another kind of patience: the patience demanded of us to wait until December 25th to open our Christmas presents. I don't like this kind of patience.
My mom used to wrap my Christmas presents in multiple layers with notes on each layer which read "I know today isn't Christmas! STOP UNWRAPPING THIS PRESENT!" She knew me well.
Jill, my wife, and I are going to have a baby in September. The ultrasound where we can find out whether it's a boy or a girl is coming up in a few weeks. We always told each other that we weren't going to find out what it was. We wanted to be surprised....
I don't think i'm gonna make it another six months.
To make it worse, i'm taking a child development class right now. It's enough to feed my anxiety for the rest of the week.

Meetings

How many meetings does the world need?

Well, judging by the effectiveness of the meetings i've attended, zero. I am actually currently sitting in a meeting. My typing is working to my advantage, I think. It looks like i'm writing down notes. Looking around I see two people actually paying attention, which includes the person speaking. What are we going to get out of this meeting besides anxiety? A whole bunch of papers that i'll leave in my car for a few weeks and then throw away as part of my bi-annually car cleaning. *Speaking of which, the weather is getting nice outside. That means it's about car cleaning season.*

I'm of the persuasion that we, as Americans, are over-meetinged. We live in a technological world full of technology-whatnots, and how do we utilize this ingenuity? By using technology to communicate to each other the times and places which we should meet to communicate to each other....

While in high school I stumbled upon this great little website called quickdot.com. If wonders exist, it was a wonder. You could add these little boxes on your quickdot page wherein you would have little instant message sessions. They weren't so much instant messages, more like little message boards. So on one page you could see all your "quickdot" conversations at once. Simple, convenient, and many more adjectives of the like. You could even add group quickdots. We had a group of about thirty friends where we would all chat about whatever we felt like for the day. The best part was, just like any other message board, you didn't have to be on at the same time. You could log in any time during the day and see what everyone else had said and add your two cents.

Now that's a meeting I could get behind. Every time I saw a post from "that guy" who always had something to say but never seemed to have a point, i'd just skip it instead of sitting for ten minutes mentally repeating "we don't care, we're hungry, stop talking!"


*DISCLAIMER* quickdot.com went offline in 2001 despite my attempts to tell the world about it.

The Florida and Michigan Problem

I completely agreed that both Florida and Michigan should have had their delegates stripped on the democratic side when they moved their primaries up earlier than February 4th in violation of party rules. But now things are different.

Florida and Michigan together possess 367 delegates (including super-delegate). Currently the difference between Obama and Clinton is about 105 delegates, with Obama being ahead in the count. There are only 611 delegates left which are still up for grabs. If this past Tuesday was any indication, they will most likely be split fairly evenly. This would leave Clinton down 265 delegates, and Obama only 154 votes shy of the nomination. Those sweet 367 emissaries from the cheating states should look pretty desirable to both campaigns right about now.

Before John Edwards dropped out of the race he was able to rack up a couple of delegates for himself. Some of those were automatically divvied out to the remaining contenders, but Edwards was able to hold on to 26 delegates since he "suspended" his campaign rather than simply "dropping out." What a sweet day it would be for John Edwards if his measly 26 delegates were able to decide the nomination.

This mess may be a blessing in disguise for the Democrats, however. With the historic nature and the closeness of the race, little attention is being given to John McCain. Now that he has the Republican nomination we can presume that he's rushing to gather support from the conservatives who loathe him so. Whether it will work or not will be pretty hard to tell, since nobody will be covering it. My guess is that McCain will launch a pretty big accusation at the Democrats or maybe have another scandal that turns out to be the product of the liberal media. Anything else just won't make headlines, and without headlines John McCain will head down the same path as Rudy Giuliani did. The path of "isn't he still in the race?"