Flickr lets you assign locations to your photos on a map, so I’ve started mapping some of my photos. Right now I’ve just got a few in New York, Anaheim, Seattle, and Vancouver, but I’ll hopefully get around to doing more. It’s a pretty fascinating tool for tracking where I’ve been.

I wouldn’t know because I rarely have to fill up, but apparently gas is almost $4.00 a gallon around here. The Mobil station on Pacific Coast Highway and Second Street had regular unleaded for $3.99 this morning.

Someone I know recently bought a Hummer, so I started to think about his daily commute expense, aside from the cost of the vehicle itself. His workplace is 18 miles from his home, and the most convenient path happens to be a toll road. The toll is currently $2.25 each way. With a generous assumption of 12 miles per gallon, he uses 3 gallons round trip. That’s approximately $8.00 of gasoline, plus $4.50 in tolls, for a total of $12.50. If he drives that 240 days a year (5 days a week, minus holidays and vacation), that’s $3,000 a year. And that’s only this year. It will presumably be more next year, and the year after that, and so forth.

That’s a lot of money. It’s too bad we don’t have a subway system here; $4.00 round trip sounds like a steal right now!

Friends of ours (Donald, Matt, and Joy) just moved in a mile or so down the road, and I’m excited to have more people setting up house in Long Beach. We used to encourage our friends to move to New York with us, and now we encourage them to move to Long Beach instead. No offense to New York; we’re just short-distance-friend gluttons.

Seems to be working (admittedly not through our own efforts), because every day we hear about someone we know who is moving or has moved here. Hooray!

Most benefited by this is Ilse, who gains new puppies to play with at the dog park.