I’m a bit devoid of interesting material tonight, so I’m just going to ramble on about a few random topics that have come up (or various other items).
First off, I forgot to mention in last night’s post about my little experiment with Kirstin on Tuesday. I was carrying her between the living room and office when we walked by the full-length mirror in the hallway. I stopped and turned to see what she was doing on my shoulder, and she smiled at me. She could see me in the mirror. So I took it a step further and made attempts to get her to see herself, just to see what would happen.
When I finally got her to see herself, she looked for a second, then got a really big grin and smile going on. It was quite amusing. The song ‘You’re So Vain’ came into my mind (I believe that’s a Carly Simon song, but don’t quote me on that — I’ve not looked it up and I don’t have it in my collection)…
In other news, we received about 9/10ths of an inch of rain in two events since about 7:30PM last night. One at around 8, then another sometime in the middle of the night. It was a good little rain that was needed. I can handle rains like that; it’s the multiple-inch rains that I can do without. Especially when they come with great frequency.
Kirstin is 10 weeks old today. Almost hard to believe, really. Still growing like a bit of a weed, but from what I’m told that will continue for some time. 🙂
I’m also experimenting with opening up comments here on any new blog entries. It should be open to the public, so if the feeling to leave a comment is too great, try it out. We’ll see how it goes. If it gets used I might keep it available, otherwise I might just shut that functionality off again. I haven’t decided yet. But I thought I’d change things up just a little bit.
And as my final bit of rambling tonight, I really had to ‘chuckle’ at one of the 10PM news headlines (for a local network whose news broadcasts I never watch, I might add) I saw this evening. There’s all this talk about gas price gouging and whatnot, and the teaser was to imply that this particular station had some ‘insight’ into what’s really going on with prices jumping before a busy holiday weekend.
I’ll tell you what’s going on — simple economics of supply and demand. I need automobile gasoline just as much as the next guy, and I don’t really care to pay over $3 a gallon for the stuff. But, I do very little frivolous driving, therefore my ‘demand’ for the stuff is less than some others. I use it as much as necessary, but try not to outside of that scope. Do I have any big holiday weekend plans which include copious amounts of traveling? No. Why? Well, amongst other things I don’t like going out on the busy weekends, but I also listen to forecasts that imply prices will ‘stabilize’ after the busy weekend. This is purely speculation on my part, but I’m guessing that it’s because the ‘demand’ will be less. Go figure. Price invariably follows demand.
I honestly doubt that we’ll see gasoline prices below $2.50 again, at least not for a long period of time if it gets that low. But until the frivolous demands for gasoline are reduced, it’s not likely that we’ll be seeing any sort of price reduction in gasoline. Some speculated that $3 gasoline would be the breaking point. I personally think it’s going to be $5 before people take their consumption seriously. I think it’d do people well to take the standpoint of ‘stocking up’ or consolidating trips to help with their incessant need for gasoline. Living three and a half miles from the nearest town (and 12 from the nearest town with multiple services), I’m not overly stoked about a 30-minute round trip just to pick up a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. Which I know far too many people who don’t think as much of something like that.
It’s a bit ridiculous. But time will tell how attitudes eventually change. We’ll see.
Anyway, until next time…
–MZ