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.

Today I picked up my new Jhane Barnes glasses at the optometrist, and I received my new phone in the mail. It’s an enV2 from LG, which is similar to the enV but smaller. I like it so far. My big complaints about the enV (which I had for a hot second) were the small keys on the front of the phone and the big overall size. This phone’s smaller, but with larger keys, so I’m pleased now.

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.

Ilse’s fur had a bunch of mats in it (particularly under her collar, because it rubs against her fur all day), so we had to get her groomed with a really close haircut. Now she looks like a poodle, much like she did the first time I took her to get groomed. (I underestimated how long her hair needed to be.) She looks better when her fur is longer, but I guess sometimes it’s good to start with a new coat.

When you get a Discover card, you’re allowed to choose from over one hundred fifty designs, and you can order a new card with a different design at your leisure. I think it’s a brilliant marketing move. When you choose a new card design, it gets you excited about using your Discover card again. You want to pull out your card with puppies on it, or palm trees, or the Statue of Liberty, so that clerks everywhere will say, “Ooh, what a cool credit card you have.” And then, as if getting you to use your card more wasn’t enough, it might also convince others who see it that they should get a Discover card. That way they can have a credit card with puppies on it.

I can understand having some different scents to choose from, and maybe one with bleach, and one that’s free of dyes and perfumes. But I seriously counted no less than twenty different varieties of Tide laundry detergent at the store yesterday, each in three or four different sizes and “concentrations.”

I think it’s time for an intervention. Mr. Procter? Mr. Gamble? You need to stop creating new versions of Tide. You have a problem. I think it stems from some kind of insecurity. “What if the customers don’t like the Mountain Spring scent? We’d better make a Spring & Renewal scent too, just in case.”

I bought Cheer instead.

My mother found a bouquet that looked like Ilse, so she gave it to my grandfather while he was in the hospital last month:

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!