Wow, I haven’t written anything since May? The saddest part about that is that my archives will always skip over June 2008, as if it’s the month that time forgot, or as if I don’t know the order of the months. “Let’s see, April, May, July… July? That’s not what’s next!”

June had weddings and stuff. Work was pretty hectic too, and is even more so now that it’s July. Ash and I have been watching a lot of HGTV, and I even tried my hand at some “Hidden Potential” inspired makeovers using Photoshop.

Ilse is sad every day while Ash is at work. She just camps out by the front door waiting, or she sleeps in her Sherpa bag all day. Oh, the poor neglected puppy. Of course she wouldn’t be neglected if she were willing to play with me, but noooo… she wants her “mommy” instead.

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.

Ash is now a cast member at the Disneyland Resort again. I’m excited because she now has access to the parks, which means I’ll get to use my annual pass more often. We can go there on dates. She got a 3-day spot in Walt Disney’s Parade of Dreams and a 5-day spot in Disney’s Electrical Parade, so apparently she’s working 8 days a week.

My friend Amanda reminded me that we start Daylight Savings Time earlier this year, namely tomorrow morning. That means that when I’m picking up my grandparents’ sugar-free anniversary cake tomorrow morning at 11am, it’s going to feel like 10am. Damn you, Daylight Savings Time, with your “new and improved” Daylight Savings Time That Lasts An Extra Long Time!

Ashleigh is making buffalo chicken pizza tonight. I’m excited because it’s one of my favorite recipes that she makes.

It’s hard adjusting to the lack of food delivery here in Southern California. I was used to having lunch delivered very often from Say Cheese, Hale & Hearty, and other great little cafes. Now I have to go pick it up myself if I want something that’s not at home. And that means actually getting in the car and driving somewhere, since there’s also nothing in walking distance. The relative inconvenience is assuaged, though, by the availability of cream cheese wontons–which didn’t exist east of the Mississippi.

I thought my friend Stephanie was understudying Ophelia in Hamlet, and I wasn’t looking forward to sitting through Hamlet, but I just realized she’s actually understudying Olivia in Twelfth Night, and that sounds much better to me.

Ash and I are moving back to California in just one week! Technically she’s going on tour for a few months, while I’m moving (with our dog and our belongings) back to California. We’re almost done packing, but it’s difficult because we have to separate everything into three categories: things we need to bring with us, things we want to ship because we don’t trust the movers, and everything else. It’s odd watching our apartment go from being a home back into being a stale room full of boxes.